Getting rid of Catalyst

Lately I’m getting really annoyed with the ATI drivers and the system instability it gave me. I posted my problems on our mailinglist but what can I do about it? Not much.

So I decided to take a look, once again, to the state of the Opensource ATI driver and made it work with the stock Entropy packages we have.

Let me warn you that if you are happy with current fglrx, don’t change it. If it ain’t broken don’t fix it!
Now if you are a bit of an experienced user and know how to revert some steps here is a small guide how to make things work for you.

Step 1: Get rid of ATI drivers
equo remove ati-drivers

Step 2: Let the kernel load the radeon module
Edit /etc/conf.d/modules and add modules=”radeon” at the end of the file

Step 3: Remove some kernel parameters from the grub menu
Edit /etc/default/sabayon-grub and remove the console=tty1quietsplash= and vga= completely.

Step 6: Use “ati” in /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and change “fglrx” to “ati” in the Driver section of the file
Now reboot.

Optionally you can also play around with the new Gallium3d implementations. To change things to use gallium3d instead of the older mesa you can use the command: eselect mesa list to show how things are currently set.

Some radeon users using newer cards (HD6970s are run on my machine) may need to use radeon.nomodeset in their boot line to avoid display corruption/unusability, especially with multi-head displays. Just an FYI if the above does not help you in the way it was intended.

Thanks joostruis, great instructions, even I could follow them, and they did the trick for me (ATI RS780 GPU). One point to add to them: remember to run “grub2-install /dev/sda” (or whatever name the device for your boot disk has) after making those Grub changes.